OpenCarolina

Recently in my IDS 380 class I had a professor instruct students to use Telnet to connect to our school’s server (ROHAN). I am always in favor of securing my computing as much as possible, so I have not used Telnet for years. My buddy Mike recently configured a network traffic monitoring program to see the information generated by a Telnet session and he actually saw his username and password sent over the network in plain text! The secure alternative to Telnet is called SSH (Secure SHell). If you are using Linux, you probably have access to SSH via the command line. For all you Windows users, PuTTY is your solution. PuTTY is a powerful, free, SSH program. You will not notice any difference in operation between Telnet and SSH, but you will be encrypting you data as it travels over the network. You can even use PuTTY on a computer which you don’t have admin rights because PuTTY is a single executable file.

A great tool which builds on the functionality of PuTTY is WinSCP. WinSCP is freeware SFTP and SCP client for Windows. Think FTP, except it is meant to explore files on other machines in a secure fashion. Because FTP has no security built in, I like to use WinSCP whenever possible. WinSCP will be able to connect to virtually any computer which accepts SSH connections. Have fun, securely.